In lieu of chapter three
It's a newsletter about nothing
You're not wrong, this should be a post entitled The Widow vs Restoration Companies: A Comedy of Errors. I've written it six different ways and all I've managed to do is put myself to sleep.
Look, the involuntary, yet mandatory crash course a widow is forced into after partner loss is hard. I know it. You know it (because I won't shut up about it), but I thought I could tell the stories and make it kind of funny, or at least somewhat amusing. But alas, she says dramatically as she gestures at the pile of discarded drafts, I have failed.
No really, I have. Here, I'll try to summarize:
It's a tale as old as time, probably. A freshly minted widow wearing one of her husband's shirts, artfully tucked up under her sticky, braless breasts, notices a troubling wet spot on her ceiling. She stands on tiptoe, pressing her finger into the damp drywall and lets out a cry of despair before dragging herself to the (digital) phonebook and forcing herself to call some experts. As she is covered in a glistening sheen of depression, grief, and is sporting a fine mist of the eau de parfum of Wishing for Death, a string of otherwise professional people attempt to take advantage of her.
Guest stars of this unfortunate charade include: a very weird builder error in the attic involving a bunch of plastic stapled to trusses (??!), moisture collecting on said weird plastic, a nasty clean up of an alarming amount of black mold, a gaping 3' x 4' hole in the bedroom ceiling, eighteen sub par sub contractors (none of whom do anything included on the quote), an incompetent home owner's insurance agent who was later fired, and mean letters from a lawyer. The sequels were not one, not two, but three destructive basement floods, of which the home owner's insurance and the restoration company are still engaged in a legal battle.
It was kind of like a very long, very drawn out Seinfeld episode, only I was the one getting my cabin burned down by Kramer's cigar.
I'm pretty sure chapter four was going to be about how I tried to buy a car for my son and was quickly reminded that being a single woman is still a pretty shit gig in today's society. It involves two tow-trucks, my brother-in-law acting as body guard, and a caught-red-handed salesperson bending over backwards to avoid a lawsuit. Maybe I'll still write that one.
Last November was Eric's three year mark. In lots of ways, some of these horrible-awful things we were forced to survive without him feel like they happened a very long time ago. The mold in the attic, the damp spot on my ceiling... they're all a bit blurry around the edges. Like they're old clips from a movie I saw before film was digitized. In other ways, the memory of them can make my chest go very tight.
Not to be gross (because I think moralizing hardship is kind of gross) I have learned some things. They're not great things or shiny happy things; they're tough things. Like how to trust people less.
I get everything in writing now. I record things people promise that aren't included in a bid. I ask my friends' beefy husbands to come stand around menacingly if I'm selling anything off Facebook Marketplace. I don't smile and nod while someone is giving me a sales pitch and I'm not polite if I think they're full of b.s.
It's progress, I guess. Uncomfortable. But progress nonetheless.